| An omnibus entertainment, PRINCE OF BROADWAY has a few bright spots, but it doesn't have a coherent point of view. Much of it is disjointed and feels arbitrary. Presumably, the idea here is to celebrate Prince's direction, an unlikely and somewhat vague premise to start, yet the show tells us very little about his magnificent achievements in that realm. And, ironically, it's poorly directed by the master himself. What we're left with is a routinely programmatic and mostly evanescent series of turns. Some of these are well performed, but few evoke the sense or great style of the originals . Among other things, a Prince show was usually entire; there was an overriding scheme or perspective to the proceedings and, whether it worked or not, it was idiosyncratic. Here, stripped of context, the evening proceeds, as reminiscences do, through the fog of memory, proving that the pitch of old pleasures can never really be known again. |
